Dynamic vs. fixed
Posted: 23. Jul 2011, 04:53
Hi there!
I was planning on installing WHS 2011 in VirtualBox running on SE11. The system sits on a mirrored rpool (2x 250 GB) and has a 4x 2 TB RAIDZ for storage and backup with SMB (classic "NAS"). I don't have the WHS ordered yet.
I assume I have to create two disks: One 160 GB system disk for the WHS and another disk as storage for the WHS (let's assume I want max. 2 TB for WHS, but I have no idea at the moment how much space I really need over the next year or so).
Now which option should I use when creating that data storage vdisk? Fixed or Dynamic?
The VirtualBox manual states: "While this format takes less space initially, the fact that VirtualBox needs to expand the image file consumes additional computing resources, so until the disk file size has stabilized, write operations may be slower than with fixed size disks. However, after a time the rate of growth will slow and the average penalty for write operations will be negligible."
But since the storage disk for WHS will continue to grow this is not really true in my case, or is it?
Since everything is stored on ZFS, doesn't a 2 TB sparse file make more sense in this case?
Does it even matter (in terms of file I/O performance and CPU load, I am running on an AMD E-350...)?
(first post, so bear with me... )
-TLB
I was planning on installing WHS 2011 in VirtualBox running on SE11. The system sits on a mirrored rpool (2x 250 GB) and has a 4x 2 TB RAIDZ for storage and backup with SMB (classic "NAS"). I don't have the WHS ordered yet.
I assume I have to create two disks: One 160 GB system disk for the WHS and another disk as storage for the WHS (let's assume I want max. 2 TB for WHS, but I have no idea at the moment how much space I really need over the next year or so).
Now which option should I use when creating that data storage vdisk? Fixed or Dynamic?
The VirtualBox manual states: "While this format takes less space initially, the fact that VirtualBox needs to expand the image file consumes additional computing resources, so until the disk file size has stabilized, write operations may be slower than with fixed size disks. However, after a time the rate of growth will slow and the average penalty for write operations will be negligible."
But since the storage disk for WHS will continue to grow this is not really true in my case, or is it?
Since everything is stored on ZFS, doesn't a 2 TB sparse file make more sense in this case?
Does it even matter (in terms of file I/O performance and CPU load, I am running on an AMD E-350...)?
(first post, so bear with me... )
-TLB